A Fairy Tale For Adults Set In 1960s

BOOKS - THE FIFTH CHILD. By Doris Lessing. Knopf. $16.95.

April 24, 1988|By DOUGLAS BALZ, Chicago Tribune

If books carried ratings, The Fifth Child would be rated PG -- not suitable for pregnant women, or for their husbands, either. Doris Lessing`s latest book is about a conventional, somewhat old-fashioned English couple, Harriet and David Lovatt, and what happens to them when Harriet gives birth to a neanderthal.

Harriet`s Baby, however, this is not. Lessing is a serious novelist, and because she is, many readers will wonder why she bothered with it at all. The style is flat, the psychological subtleties are insufficiently explored and the point of view is distinctly old-fashioned. But then, this isn`t really a novel at all, but a fairy tale for adults. An examination of the story will make this obvious.

It begins in the 1960s, a time of loose morals and superheated sex. Harriet is a virgin, looking for a husband. David is a sober-minded bachelor, more interested in raising a family than succeeding in his job. They are an odd couple, but when they meet, they know they are meant for each other. Within months they have married, purchased a big house in a small town near London and settled down to raise a large family.

The Lovatts believe the true basis of happiness is a large family. And for a time, their dream comes true. Four children are born to them, and happy laughter fills their home, along with relatives and friends who flock to the Lovatts, eager to share in the good fellowship.

And then Ben is born. Ben was like no child anyone had seen before. Harriet thought he looked like a troll or a goblin, and as the months passed and the infant showed no sign of human feelings, her judgment seemed confirmed. Ben was a throwback to another age, an atavistic creature more suited to life in a cave than an English town.

David wants to ship him off to an institution, but Harriet resists. After all, hadn`t the doctor said he was normal? ``He may be normal for what he is,`` says Harriet`s mother. ``But he is not normal for what we are.``

Eventually, Harriet relents, but then, guilt-stricken, she rescues him from his keepers, and from certain death. (Her visit to the forbidding institution in the north of England is one of the grimmest passages in this cheerless book.)

Ben`s return seals the family`s fate. Although she struggles until book`s end to domesticate her son, Harriet fails. By the end of the book, David has turned his energies into his job, becoming the man he hoped never to be. The three oldest children have left home to live with other relatives, and the fourth child is emotionally crippled by his life at home.

By obeying the imperatives of her society -- saving her child`s life, rearing him as any mother would rear her son -- Harriet has lost everything.

Lessing recounts the story through an omniscient, third-person narrator, a decidedly shopworn method of storytelling but one that is perfectly appropriate here. See if you recognize the voice: ``On the afternoon the house became theirs, they stood hand in hand in the little porch, birds singing all around them in the garden. ...``

That is the voice of childhood fairy tales; Lessing`s story is the first fable of the age of AIDS. As people abandon their promiscuous ways, Lessing`s pitiless narrator reminds us that home is not a refuge from a dangerous world. That is the moral of this odd little story: Honorable intentions and the pursuit of happiness do not mean we will live happily ever after.